All Your Demons And Archfiends

It affects us all differently. Some confuse busyness with productivity, and some of us know better. All i know is I have a lot to do and I can’t seem to do it fast enough.

So I’m reviewing 4e lore, and trying to contextualize it with lore from previous editions. It isn’t really that hard, when you get right down to it: 4e is very much a post-apocalyptic setting, based on the literal ruins of the previous editions.

I mean if you want to joke about the edition wars, 4e is quite literally built on the wreckage of 3e: complete with gods, archdemons, prestige classes, Monkey Grip, and what-have-you.

A few things bug me in the vagueness of how long it’s been since the fall of various empires. I mean, distinct martial arts styles have survived thousands of years since the fall of Bael Turath, apparently.

I’d rather the timeline were more compressed: that things take place within a few hundred years of each other rather than the great yonks described in the text. No thank you sir, you haven’t earned it.

I’ve been interested to see how bits of older lore trickled into 4e throughout the run of 4e: it’s kind of fun to see how Nerull pops up now and again, threatening to supplant the Raven Queen and reclaim his title as god of death and the dead.

In retrospect, I wasn’t fair to 4e about its lore. I also remember that I didn’t care. I want ready to put down the rules I’d spent five years mastering just to get the latest thing from the Moneymancers of the Coast.

And I regret it, a little. Just a little. I can see from what little I’ve picked up from 5e that something interesting is going on there, but I’m sure like 4e it won’t be groundbreaking.

D&D arguably reached its zenith in its earliest days and has just struggled to stay relevant since then. Whether it was with dark elf boobs, or uh,… dragonborn boobs. You know how fantasy artwork can be.

So, I’ve been compiling what I’ve found into a wiki. It will be a little easier to navigate than the blog, for those playing in my local group.

That means some demon lords and some elemental princes and some archfey. It’s cool, it’s cool.